


This is Where We Fell In Love (But Not The First Time)

by sequence_fairy



Category: Bleach
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-28
Updated: 2016-06-17
Packaged: 2018-06-05 03:55:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6688216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sequence_fairy/pseuds/sequence_fairy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And she'll keep looking for him, keep finding him, keep losing him. And he'll keep forgetting her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. One

_Oh sweetheart_   
_I'd go lengths and lengths and lengths of love_ _  
Since we started this thing now_

  * Length of Love - Interpol



 

Rukia knows, instinctively, when she finds him again on a rainy night in Karakura Town, that this time, _this time_ , they’re going to make it. She can feel the tightening of the red thread around her wrist; feel the way his soul calls out to hers and the way hers answers. He can see her (of course he can see her, he’s never _not_ been able to see her, but it’s still a surprise because it’s been so long since she’s seen him and he’s right here, in front of her) and she can’t quite manage to keep her hands from reaching out. He takes it as a threat (because of course he would) and she barely dodges his clumsy attack.

She ignores his questions, and unfurls her senses, trying to find the Hollow - she doesn’t have time to explain now, she has to find this thing before it destroys him (before she has to watch him die again, because the thread around her wrist is starting to fray and she doesn’t know what it means).

The Hollow finds them instead, and Rukia makes the same reckless choice she will always make where he is concerned and throws herself in front of him. The Hollow’s teeth bite down through her shoulder and she feels the hot rush of blood down her back and the snap of her collarbone is white hot and drives the breath from her lungs.

She grits her teeth and ignores the pain. There is only one option. Ichigo Kurosaki is not going to die on this street tonight.

She offers him everything she has to save his family, because she can do nothing less. She knows that what she’s offering him might kill him, but she also knows that the Hollow will kill him if she doesn’t do this. She’s been waiting hundreds of years to find him this time, because this time, she’s fallen off the wheel of reincarnation and after landing in the _Rukongai_ , has become _shinigami_. She can’t wait any longer; refuses to lose him to something that she can save him from. Not this time. Never again if she can help it.

When her _zanpakuto_ sinks into his chest, with his hands wrapped around hers, she sees the moment he remembers - watches as the years and the lifetimes flash behind his eyes. She feels the way his hands tighten around hers and watches his eyes widen as he takes her in.

“Rukia,” he says, and she feels the burn of tears behind her eyes. Her name is almost a sob, and there’s a breathless kind of relief behind his voice. There is a taste of ozone in the air, and she shivers with anticipation and the sudden, feverish flood of desire through her veins. She knows he can feel it, and when he repeats her name, his voice is laced with heat and his eyes are molten.

“Ichigo,” she murmurs, tasting the way his name feels in her mouth. It’s been more than a century, and it still feels the same way that it always did, like a prayer and a plea all at once. Ichigo grins and _oh_ , his smile still makes the butterflies skip in her stomach. She returns the smile with a flash of her own.

The maelstrom of her power envelops them in a flash of white.

When it dissipates, she’s bereft; adrift without her anchor and he is a wild, pulsing presence in the back of her mind, his _reiatsu_ sparking and flaring until Rukia feels the moment when it settles into steely determination and hardened resolve. She watches him dispatch the Hollow, her eyes tracing the lean lines of his body, remembering the feel of his skin, the touch of his hands, the warmth of his soul next to hers. She remembers waking up next to him, she remembers curling around him in the evenings, she remembers the fights and the laughter, the tears and the slowly simmering heat.

She thinks back, to the first time.

The first time, they were young (so young and so innocent and so carefree and Rukia will never forget how easily the smile lived on his face and in his eyes because it’s never been like that since) and they were headstrong and they were in love and when he died (impaled on the sword of one of her father’s enemies, killed for the crime of wanting to protect her with his life), Rukia remembers feeling like she’d died too. She remembers the way he’d gone still and cold in her arms, the way his blood pooled beneath them, how she’d raged and screamed and begged, desperate to join him in the eternal darkness.She remembers the bite of steel against her neck and her last choking gasp.

She remembers the black, the way it enveloped them, until the only light was coming from the red thread wrapped around their wrists, linking them together across the divide of death. She remembers the gate, its stone doors impossibly tall and heavy. She remembers the voice that whispered through the darkness.

_You want to stay with him?_

Rukia hadn’t hesitated. Her hands clutched at his shoulders reflexively, and she looked down at his face, eyes closed and skin ashen. “I do.”

_He’ll forget you._

“I don’t care. I love him. I’ll find him. I’ll do _anything_.”

_If you’re certain._

“I am.”

_So be it._

Every time she dies, she comes back, and it starts over. He never remembers.

The first couple of times (and they both often still die young, and usually in each other’s arms, like that first time) she thinks that she can get him to remember - if she just does the right thing or says the right thing or touches him just right or or _or_.

Except that he never remembers. He seems to understand things about her instinctively, but he never remembers that they’ve met before, that they’ve loved before. She buries the hurt behind smiles and laughter but it’s not enough and in the first few go rounds, she’s loses him more often because she can’t hide the hurt that he doesn’t remember (that he doesn’t already love her) deep enough that he won’t notice and she remembers watching him walk away so many times, his shoulders square even while her entire world crumbles around her.

Sometimes, they get years together, sometimes, only a few days. Sometimes, they get nothing at all. Sometimes, he’s found someone else before she finds him and those times, Rukia wishes she’d never made this bargain. She watches him laugh with someone else, and aches. There’s never anyone else for her.

And now, she’s been waiting for more than a century to see him again. And now he’s killing Hollows with a  brutal efficiency that reminds her of the way he used to fight when he was her father’s vassal and how he must have fought when he died on a beach in the middle of the Pacific ocean. When he’s finished and the Hollow has dissipated in a stream of _reiatsu_ particles and the chime of glass wings, he slings his borrowed sword over his shoulders and _looks_ at her.

“I know you,” he says, and Rukia nods. He does, he knows her inside and out, knows the secret places in her soul that no one else knows, knows everything there ever was to know about her - and he forgets it every time. “But how?” His face is the picture of confusion, eyebrows drawn together, mouth turned down in a frown and eyes dark with inner turmoil. “I’ve never met you before tonight, I didn’t even know your name.”

“I’m Rukia Kuchiki,” Rukia says, resolutely ignoring the way her heart breaks because he _had_ remembered, he had known her and looked at her like he’d known her and not like she was a stranger. Ichigo nods.

“I know that,” he says, “but I don’t know how I know that and I don’t know why you know me and I don’t know what just happened and I don’t know what’s going on and holy _shit_ .” He wavers on his feet and Rukia reaches out, her hands catching on the sleeves of his borrowed _shihakusho_ but without enough grip to keep him standing.

The sword clatters to the ground and Ichigo follows it down.

“Ichigo!” Rukia throws herself to her knees, heedless of the way the grit on the street digs into her skin. She runs her hands over him frantically, checking for injuries and finds none. She gently sweeps his bangs off his face, and ignores the way his eyelashes fan dark against his skin, and ignores the soft smattering of freckles that cover his nose, because if she lets herself, she won’t be able to stop touching him. 

He comes around slowly, blinking up at her like a sleepy lion before he scrambles to his feet, and puts a healthy amount of distance between them. He forgets his (hers - because she is, for the first time since she woke in the _Rukongai_ barefoot and hungry, alone in her own head) _zanpakuto_ on the ground.

“Who _the fuck_ are you?” He asks and Rukia winces at the rough slice of his voice against the raw edges of her heart.

“I told you,” she says, deciding to hide the hurt behind snark, because it’s easier than anything else, “I’m Rukia Kuchiki, and I just saved your worthless life.”

Ichigo gapes at her.

There’s a groan from down the street and Ichigo whirls around. Rukia watches him go to his family, and watches the bewilderment set in when he realises they can’t hear him. Gathering herself, she steps into the fastest _shunpo_ she can manage in her current state and arrives at his side in two breaths. She can’t stop the tremors in her hands and she can barely stay on her feet. He took nearly everything she had.

“They can’t see you,” she explains, and he startles.

“Why not?”

“Because you’re _shinigami_ now, and you are no longer part of the world of the living.”

“I’m – I’m _what_!?” Ichigo splutters. Rukia waits him out, leaning against the low stone wall that runs along the sidewalk. Eventually, Ichigo spots his body lying sprawled on the pavement, and stills. “Am I – I’m dead aren’t I?” Ichigo turns to face her finally, and the pain in his eyes takes her breath away.

“No,” Rukia answers, “not exactly. I don’t think so anyway, I mean, we should be able to put you back in your body, but I’m not really sure? It’s not like last-ditch efforts like this come with instruction manuals.”  

“You stabbed me! How am I not dead? I don’t –”  Ichigo exhales forcefully and tunnels his fingers into his hair. Rukia is assaulted by a vivid memory of the noise he used to make whenever she did that. The helpless sound that comes out of his mouth now is not the same noise, and it jolts her out of her reverie.

“Relax Ichigo,” Rukia mutters, and pushes off from the concrete wall. She sways on her feet, but keeps her balance.

“Hey,” Ichigo says, reaching out to grab her elbow. “Are you okay?”

“I will be. Just –” Rukia can’t help but lean into him, and Ichigo fumbles to catch her. Her head is buzzing and she can feel her heart beating like it’s trying to escape her chest.

“Whoa, hey, it’s alright,” Ichigo says, “just relax, okay?”

“I am perfectly fine,” Rukia snaps, gathering herself and shaking off his hands. She doesn’t want to feel him against her when he doesn’t know her (when he doesn’t know what it does to her when he runs his hand down her spine, fingers splayed wide across her ribs). “Come here,” she says, and tells him how to get back into his body.

It works, and Rukia steps back, calling on the dregs of her power to weave the memory spell that’ll keep his family safe. When they wake up in the morning, they will have forgotten her. Ichigo already has.


	2. Two

_But we went through with these_   
_Oh we're shifting the heartache_ _  
We want strong summer love that must roam_

  * Length of Love - Interpol



 

Because she can do nothing else (because what else is there for her to do now that she is powerless), and because he will end up dead if she doesn’t teach him how to defend himself, Rukia insinuates herself into Ichigo’s life.

She should have known this would be hard. Should have known that sleeping in his closet, teaching him to hunt Hollows and how to keep himself alive, all while he has no idea who she is, would be the hardest thing she’s ever had to do. The worst thing, the _absolute_ worst thing about it all? He _had_ remembered. She knows he had, because she can still hear his voice in her head. Can still see the flash of liquid heat in his eyes, can still feel the way it felt to finally be near him again - near him properly, not this half-remembered nearness that they’ve suffered through for more than a millennia.

He fights her at every turn, doesn’t willingly mold himself into anyone’s protector, doesn’t take to the fighting the way she’d thought he would. He’s loud and boisterous and so _young_. She thinks they were never truly this young, and she wishes she could have given him ten more years to grow into himself this time, because she knows the man he will be, but he doesn’t, not yet.

Sometimes, in the precipice between sleeping and waking, she thinks he might still remember, because when he looks at her then, his eyes hazy with the remains of his dreams, it seems like he _knows_ but then he blinks, and the expression of hopeful interest is replaced by his ever-present scowl.

They save Orihime from her brother, and Rukia watches as Ichigo shoulders the responsibility of his new role with the sort of surly acquiescence that she remembers from the end days of a life they shared, in the steamy heat of a summer nestled in the late sixties.

They’d found each other that time, and Rukia remembers the moment like it was yesterday - his bright hair in the sun, and the smile that turned up one corner of his mouth. She remembers the ringing guitars and the scent of sweet smoke in the air. He’d reached a hand out to her, wrist wrapped in a daisy chain, and Rukia’d taken it without hesitation.

She cherishes the three months they had that lifetime, because they were golden days. Every memory is sunlit and every moment framed by the molten amber of his eyes and timbre of his voice. She catches herself slipping into the memories during class, catches herself looking for the Ichigo that was then in the Ichigo that is now.

One night, he takes her with him to the mall - determined that she should own clothes that are not his sister’s - and Rukia loses herself in the shabby record store that Ichigo walks right past as if he doesn’t see it. She flips through bins of records, lifting out sleeves of familiar albums. The store owner takes notice of her, and tries to strike up a conversation, but Rukia is lost in the swirl of memory.

~-~

“Come with me, moon girl,” the boy with the bright orange hair says and Rukia looks up, and gasps. It’s _him_ , she’s found him. His eyes are the same as always, but the pain is buried deeper this time, masked by the haze of smoke that wafts around his head.

“Ichigo,” Rukia breathes without thinking and the boy startles. Then he laughs. The sound is rich and lovely and Rukia stores it away for later, attaches it firmly to this memory she is making so that she can always have that sound. He hasn’t laughed properly in lifetimes - and this still isn’t it, but it’s closer than it’s been in decades.

“You really are a moon girl aren’t you? How d’you know my name? Have we met before?” He waggles his eyebrows suggestively and Rukia snorts.

“No,” she says, but takes his offered hand anyway. If he is startled by the frisson of something that ripples through her skin when they touch, he doesn’t show it.

He has her for the first time in the back of his ‘67 Camaro, the engine purring beneath them while their breath fogs up the windows. His hands are everywhere: threaded into her hair, dragging down her sides, and skimming up the inside of her thighs. She’s writhing under him, and he kisses the moans out of her mouth. When he finally sinks into the velvet heat of her, Rukia snaps her hips up to meet his thrusts and the hitched gasp that escapes his mouth makes her grin.

He drives into her, palms flat on the seat beside her head, and elbows locked. She can see the muscles in his arms shaking with the strain of holding out. “Ichigo,” she moans, voice gone low and wrecked, and he drops his head, fringe brushing against her face. His chest is heaving, and his hips stutter against hers as he turns the tempo from a race to a slow and deliberate climb.

“Rukia,” he says, voice dark and hot. He catches her eyes with his. It’s always his eyes, she thinks, their startling depth and molten warmth holding her pinned. Her breath stutters. Moments like this, when he looks at her like he is seeing into the deepest parts of her, she thinks he must remember, must know somehow who she is. But then he blinks, and the moment is lost.

“Don’t stop,” she begs, and Ichigo doesn’t, but the wild race is over. Now, he takes his time, hips rolling into hers with conscious calculation. “Faster,” Rukia pleads, “come on, I’m nearly there.” Ichigo grins, and he speeds up, just enough that Rukia is straining towards the climax that is just out of her reach. “Dirty fucking _tease_ ,” Rukia growls, digging her nails into his shoulders. Ichigo hisses, and this time when his eyes catch hers, something dark swims in their depths and the grin on his face turns sharp.

“How badly do you want to come Rukia?” he asks, lowering his head so his mouth is next to her ear. He traces the shell of her ear with his tongue, before catching it in his teeth. Goosebumps ripple across her skin and Rukia shivers with the pleasure-tipped pain of the bite.

“God. Ichigo. _Please,_ ” Rukia moans. Her voice is breathless with pleasure and Ichigo hums into her ear.

“All you had to do was ask,” he says, and picks up the pace again. Rukia slides a hand down her body, and slicks her fingers through the wet heat of where they are joined. Between her fingers and the clever twist of his hips, she’s flying apart in no time. He reaches the peak just as she does and she hears the creak of the leather under his hands, as his fingers dig into the seat of the car.

After that, they spend more time in bed then out of it. Curled around each other in the humid evenings, making their way through the book on some kind of erotic meditations that Ichigo found in a church-basement thrift store somewhere just east of Lake Tahoe.

Sometimes, they live out of his car. Other times, in houses filled with other young people chasing peace and love and the freedom of the open the road. In San Francisco, after a night of partying to celebrate a friend’s last night before being sent overseas, he lifts her up against a wall in an alley and takes her apart with his hand over her mouth to keep her from making a sound. The mark of her teeth in his skin lingers for weeks.

Rukia returns the favour while they’re driving down Highway 1, heading for the big city lights of LA. Ichigo lasts, hands white knuckled on the wheel and Rukia’s head in his lap and her lips wrapped around his cock, until the closest rest area. They come to a stop in a cloud of dust and Ichigo comes with a shout, his fingers threaded into her hair so tightly it brings tears to her eyes.

It’s after they’ve been in Los Angeles for a month, bouncing from flatshare to flatshare, that he gets the news. His number’s come up, and Rukia feels the knife of remembered loss go through her when he walks back to the car from the payphone, shoulders hunched and face drawn into a sulky frown.

“I’ve been drafted,” he says, voice flat. “I have to report by next week.” The letter had come to his parents’ place, back in Oakland. Rukia watches, over the drive back up the coast, as tension previously unknown in this life settles into the set of his shoulders. By the time they are negotiating the traffic in San Jose. there is a grim sort of acceptance in the jut of his jaw.

They stop and spend one last night together, pooling their meager funds to pay for a real bed and a good meal. That night, for the first time, it’s soft and it’s slow and at the end of it, Rukia feels the burn of tears in the back of her eyes and she is not surprised by the way Ichigo clings to her, face buried in the join of her neck, heart hammering against hers.

She slips out before dawn, determined to leave with the memory of his hands on her skin instead of yet another memory of watching him leave.

“I love you,” she says, bending down to kiss him. The corners of his mouth lift in his sleep. “I’ll find you again.”

She hears later, through the grapevine of their acquaintances, that he died, saving his unit, in a jungle on the other side of the world. Rukia sighs as the junk sinks and settles in her veins and closes her eyes against the pain.

~-~

“Rukia!” Ichigo’s voice shatters her reverie, and Rukia opens her eyes to the Ichigo she found this time. “I’ve been looking for you for ages,” he complains, and Rukia shakes her head, trying to clear the fog of memory. “C’mon, mall’s nearly closed - you still want to shop right?”

“No, I –” Rukia begins. Ichigo raises an eyebrow, incredulous.

“Now you _don’t_ want to shop. Why did we even come here then?”

“ _You_ dragged _me_ here,” Rukia protests, “said I needed ‘clothes of my own, not my sister’s cast-offs’, didn’t you?”

The soul pager picks that moment to go off and if the smack of her gloved hand against his chest is harder than usual, as a result of being so rudely pulled back from the safety of her memories, no one but Rukia is keeping track.

Ichigo goes flying out of his body and Rukia helps him wrangle it out of the way. They’ll come back for it later (and Rukia makes a mental note to make sure that she gets out to Urahara’s this week, they need to get him a proper _gikon_ in order to make it so they don’t have to stash his body in closets anymore).

The Hollow is pathetic, and Ichigo slices through it with casual ease. Rukia almost wishes it had been a harder fight, because this _gigai_ she is trapped in makes her feel claustrophobic and she is itching to get out of it. She wonders if there’s something wrong with it, because she doesn’t feel like her powers are returning like they should. She also hates it because while she’s in it, the red string she has become accustomed to seeing tied around her wrist has disappeared.

She hates not being to able to see what’s happened to it. She worries that it’s still fraying, that eventually, it will just fall off and it will be too late. She dreads the day. Something tells her that this is their last chance, that if something doesn’t give this time, that if he doesn’t remember properly, and soon, she will lose him forever.

They sneak back into the mall after hours. Ichigo sets her down in the centre court, and they dig his body out of where they stashed it. Ichigo slips back in, and they break out of the mall, alarms ringing shrilly in their wake.

That aborted shopping trip takes place the first week of June, and Rukia should have noticed something was off about him. He withdraws more and more, the closer they get to the middle of the month. He asks her for a day off and she can’t believe his nerve.

“There are no days off Ichigo,” she says, watching him at the window in his room. His eyes are distant, looking out over the city and seeing something else.

“It’s the anniversary.” He half-turns so she can see his face. The corners of his mouth lift up in the barest grin, like he’s trying to hide whatever he’s feeling, even though she can see that whatever this anniversary is - it’s an unpleasant reminder. Rukia feels like she’s walked straight into waist high mud and the tide is coming in. Ichigo continues; “the anniversary of my mom’s death. Well, actually, it’s not just the day she died, it’s the day she was killed.”

  
Rukia says nothing.


End file.
